LatinOcean – Digital Marketing Consulting

Act 1: Thursday evening. Jorge is reluctantly watching Law and Order on FTA TV

Act 2: Commercial break. The latest VW EOS ad screens. The song for the ad reminds Jorge of the song that Julia Delpy’s character in ‘before sunset’ sings to Ethan Hawke’s whilst they are in her Paris apartment

Act 3: Jorge looks for the name and artist for the ad song online. Yahoo answers and Answer Bank yield old results – looks like the EOS has a bit of a reputation re. using catchy songs

Act 4: YouTube’s EOS ad clip comments provide the song and singer names

Act 5: Jorge goes to iTunes and buys/downloads the song. Jorge is definitely not going to buy an EOS in the foreseeable future

Act 6: Jorge goes back to the couch secretly hoping that Basia Bulat is paying VW for advertising/royalties, not the other way around

Have a great long weekend

I have given the What We Offer section a very small update, as I have now included a LinkedIn master class session and the management of recruitment advertising campaigns on Google (AdWords) in our offerings portfolio.

I have been very suscint in what I have included on the site mainly because every time I have delivered on these services, they vary substantially depending on the client requirements. I might need to expand on the basics perhaps, as newbie clients come on the site and they need a bit more handlholding, which I am more that happy to offer.

Feel free to pass these details around, there will be a referral fee for you. And even better if you want to take our services up.

from the Google Aussie Blog

I am pretty sure it makes commercial sense for at least one of the parties; but doesn’t it also impede the possibility for ffx to integrate its offline advertising arm with its online sibling to get a bit more oomph for the client? Or is the Aussie media company happy to compromise and then push Google to sell paper ads, as it was announced last year in the US?

Addtional news on the subject here and here

Simply Hired, a vertical search engine, is now powering job search in MySpace UK, the first integration outside the one in the US. It might just be that SH is Myspace’s (News’?) jobs strategy globally, which in the medium term has to have implication for careerone. We will surely continue filling in the blanks when careerone releases its site, which I understand is was in the last legs of heavy testing.

Also related: Cheesman does not believe that Simply Hired will be gobbled up by Google

When I mention I’m an engineer in our Sydney office, I’m often greeted with looks of surprise: it seems many people aren’t aware of our Australian presence. Thus, it is with great pleasure that we are inviting engineers from Silicon Valley (or anywhere in California) to the Googleplex in Mountain View next Tuesday, 8 May for G’day Google: an evening (6-9 pm) open house event showcasing Google Australia…

… Working in the Sydney office is lots of fun and incredibly challenging. My desk looks over Darling Harbour, so it can sometimes be difficult to spend all day looking at a monitor.

from G’day California, organised by Google Australia, and intended to leverage off a particularly strong regional employer brand to reap talent for the co’s worldwide offices. My guess is they may recruit more yanks into Sydney than get expats to come back. Where’s your money on?

Googlers

Rebranding Froggle to Product Search is a bit like rebranding Google to Search, don’t you think?

MM, miss you and your cheese cracks at the old blog where you were you

ref: official rebranding post at the google blog

Tonic systems, via wayback machine (current site is just faq’s) – with offices in san francisco and melbourne – has been acquired by Google. Tonic’s presentation software and document conversion technology will add to Google’s docs and spreadsheets environment.

via the official Google blog

Most of the people I have talked with recently either haven’t heard or delved much into understanding the Google Base service. In a nutshell, Base is a free-of-charge classifieds-like space that enables advertisers load their ads in specific verticals: cars, houses, personals, jobs, etc. The idea as the google base blog explains it to posters is that

“based on your items’ relevance, users may find (your ads) in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search”

(further down in the same page, the Base Reach description actually does away with the “gogle web search” part so there’s a bit of a mixed message there)

This is not just catered for the one-ad pusher: the site has instructions for advertisers with serious volumes. And obviously, this is not part of a charity program; more content (from posters) produces more pages and pageviews (for/from the user) which produces more ad view opportunities (for Google’s paying advertisers) and more ad revenue (for Google).

Effectively, when you do a search on Google, it is not evident yet that Base results are coming up as natural or sponsored results. Yet. Instead, if you want to see Base listings you have to go to the Base search page (if you are in the know of something different, yell). This is understandable as it is expected that a service like this will create contention between Google and its advertisers as it effectively competes with them; the issue tails onto Google advertisers’ own clients, who in theory at least, could effectively load up classifieds directly to Google. So, this is clearly disruptive.

Somehow or other, I see the contention going away, whether it is through sheer muscle or via a compromise that assures advertisers that they are still getting their money’s worth. In this context, it will be interesting to see what is the service take up once Google goes all out on it and how it is featured to complement the current advertiser services.

At this stage of the game I would venture that free classifieds are not going away. The obvious fact is that advertisers do not pay to just blast data online, but to attract the right audience. You may say that this is the core reason why you still want to pay a job board for ad posting or (may be less so) for a print ad in the paper: because they get you the right individuals. If not, well they need to try harder for you.

Among early Base adopters in Australia, I was able to see today that sites like Careerone and Nowhiring, posting on behalf of their own clients with the aim of further reaching the available channels to look for talent on the web. Who will be the first agency to use Base locally?